Render Quality: higher has less stuttering?

[Krazy1]

I've always been annoyed by how much stutter there is when flying low and fast when new terrain detail "pops" into existence. Even on a very low part count ship, it stuttered badly. Like in a low Mun orbit over the poles. It's freezes about 100ms freezes every 2 sec. 

I always had the Render Quality set to "Beautiful" and I just tried increasing it to "Fantastic" and it's much smoother. The terrain spawn stuttering is much less noticeable. The framerate didn't seem to drop at all.

I'm on Win 10 with a GTX1060 3GB at 1920x1200

graphics settings

[linuxgurugamer]

The game is more dependent on cpu, whats the rest of your system like?

[Krazy1]

Old but not too bad. KSP is definitely not using all of my CPU: Xeon X5670 2.9 GHz 6/12c runs at 25-30%.

Single-thread is not impressive.

benchmark vs new i3

12 GB ram, SSD.

I do have some time off next week and some Christmas money... and the mobo is at least 10 year old. It seems my fate is sealed.